Thursday, September 24, 2009
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a plug-in for MSIE 6/7/8 that replaces the Microsoft JavaScript engine by a much faster Chrome JavaScript engine. The Chrome engine also adds support for HTML5, canvas, and other features.

The plug-in is only activated for websites whose webmasters have inserted the following meta-tag to their pages:

<meta content='chrome=1' http-equiv='X-UA-Compatible'/>

But The Reference Frame is among them. As far as my measurements go, it used to take 10 seconds from pressing the "TRF" button to seeing the top of the right sidebar in Internet Explorer. This rather long time makes TRF an excellent benchmark. ;-)

With Google Chrome Frame, the time was reduced to 6 seconds. That's an improvement. But my Google Chrome 4.0 shows the sidebar in 3 seconds, much like the newest official Mozilla Firefox, namely 3.5.3. Chrome is much faster in some respects: for example, its startup is literally immediate.